How do I use non-plaintext passwords for Tomcat users?

Question

On Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS, after installing Tomcat 6, the way to add a manager / admin account is to add a record like this to /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml:

<role rolename="manager"/>
<role rolename="admin"/>
<user username="user" password="password" roles="manager,admin"/>

That password is in plaintext, and I'm not comfortable with that. Is there a way to use something like a hash instead? If you have a non-Ubuntu solution, I can probably translate it.

Answer 1

Taken from this page

1) add "digest" attribute on your <Realm> element in server.xml with value "md5". For now it's strongly algorithm for password encoding in tomcat 
2) go to your CATALINA_HOME and run 
> java -cp lib/catalina.jar:bin/tomcat-juli.jar org.apache.catalina.realm.RealmBase -a md5 <YOUR_PASSWORD> 
You will get <YOUR_PASSWORD>:<ENCRYPTED_PASSWORD> 
3) replace value of user's "password" attribute in your tomcat-users.xml to <ENCRYPTED_PASSWORD> 
4) restart tomcat 

Tomcat digest password